Science, Morality, and Nationalism: The Multifaceted Project of Mahendra Lal Sircar

Studies in History

Volumn 17, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 245-274

  Chakraborty, Pratik ^a  

^a Centre for Historical Studies   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33645684551     PISSN: 02576430     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/025764300101700204     Document Type: Article

References (117)

1. Mahendra Lal Sircar, ‘On the desirability of a national institution for the cultivation of science by the natives of India’, in Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science, Calcutta, 1877, p. 8.
2. Deepak Kumar, Science and the Raj: 1857–1905, Delhi, 1997 (1998).
3. Some important papers jointly written by them include: Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, ‘Bhadralok perception of science, technology and cultural nationalism’, Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXXII: 1, 1995, pp. 95–117;
4. Dhruv Raina and S. Irfan Habib, ‘Copernicus, Columbus, and colonialism and the role of science in nineteenth century India’, Social Scientist, Vol. 17: 3–4, pp. 51–66.
5. Also see Dhruv Raina, ‘Evolving perspectives on science and history: A chronicle of modern India's scientific enchantment and disenchantment’, Social Epistemology, Vol. II: 1, pp. 3–4.
6. Gyan Prakash, ‘Science between the lines’, in Shahid Amin and Dipesh Chakraborty’, eds, Subaltern Studies; Writings on South Asian History and Society, Vol. IX, Delhi, 1996.
7. Sircar's life and career has been well documented. The major writings on Sircar were biographies. The earliest biography of Sircar was by Sarat Chandra Ghosh, Life of Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar, Calcutta, 2nd edition, 1935.
8. The other was Manoranjan Gupta's, Dr. Mahendra Lal Sircar, Calcutta, 1959, (in Bengali).
9. However, the most important is S.N. Sen's, Dr. Mahendralal Sircar, Calcutta, 1986, (in Bengali).
10. Also see Chittabrata Palit, ‘Mahendralal Sircar, 1833–1904: The quest for national science’, in Deepak Kumar, ed., Science and Empire: Essays in the Indian Context, Delhi, 1991, p. 156. These were located within a contemporary depiction of scientific thought in nineteenth century India and its provinces, discussing the broad trends within contemporary scientific thought. They generally followed Whiggish-nationalist patterns of history writing. They accepted science and nationalism as naturally progressive and enlightening and the story of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was seen as one of a gradual, progressive articulation of these ideas. Such an approach precluded the possibility of a critical understanding of the contradictions, predicaments and crises that the links between Sircar's science and his nationalism might have produced.
11. IACS, A Century, Calcutta, 1976, pp. 5–10.
12. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1899, p. 19, 18.
13. Jatinder K. Bajaj, ‘Francis Bacon, the first philosopher of modern science: A non-western view’, in Ashis Nandy, ed., Science, Hegemony and Violence; A Requim for Modernity, Delhi, (1988) 1990, p. 28.
14. Geraldine Hancock Forbes, Positivism in Bengal: A Case Study in the Transmission and Assimilation of an Ideology, Calcutta, 1975, p. 6.
15. P.C. Ray, Life and Experiences of a Bengali Chemist, London, 1932, pp. 140–41.
16. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1878, p. 17. Here he almost repeated Bacon's view that: ‘Those who have attributed the pre-eminence to logic, and have thought that it afforded the safest support to learning, have seen very correctly and properly that man's understanding, when left to itself, is deservedly to be suspected’.
17. Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, Bacon's Preface, The Works, ed. and trans. Basil Montague, 3 vols. Philadelphia, 1854, 3, p. 336, 16.
18. Mahendra Lal Sircar, ‘On the necessity of national support to an institution for the cultivation of the physical science by the native of India’, February, 1872, in idem, Indian Association, p. 16.
19. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1902, p. 20.
20. Mahendra Lal Sircar, Moral Influences of Physical Science, Calcutta, 1892, p. 19.
21. Sircar, ‘On the desirability’, pp. 4–5.
22. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1901, p. 26.
23. Sircar, ‘On the desirability’, p. 4.
24. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS. Calcutta, 1893, pp. 17–18.
25. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, pp. 17–18.
26. IACS, Annual Report, 1893, p. 18, 7.
27. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, p. 19.
28. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1887, p. 15. Elsewhere Sircar had voiced similar concerns: Hence the cultivation of science must form an indispensable element of our national culture, as it is in all civilised countries…. It is with this view, Gentlemen, that I have striven all my life long to induce my countrymen, Hindu and Mahometan alike, and any other race of people who pride in the name of India, to unite in the holy bonds of fraternal sympathy and love for the common, worthy cause of mutual advancement by the at present best means, and I might say, the only means, within human reach, namely, the cultivation of the physical sciences.
29. IACS, Annual Report, 1893, p. 18, 22.
30. Sircar, ‘On the necessity’, p. 25. He added: ‘…there is an immense difference between the civilised man and the man happening to live in civilised times, between the man of science and the man whom accident has placed in the era of science….’
31. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, p. 18.
32. Edward Said, Orientalism, London, 1978, p. 121.
33. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self under Colonialism, New Delhi, p. 11–18.
34. First meeting of Subscribers at the Senate Hall, Calcutta University, 4 April 1875, cited in Palit, ‘Mahendralal Sircar, 1833–1904’, p. 156.
35. Sircar, ‘On the necessity’, p. 33.
36. Arun Kumar Biswas, ‘Revered Father Eugene Lafont and the scientific activity of St. Xavier's college’, Indian Journal of History of Science, Vol. 129: 1, 1994, p. 84.
37. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1898, p. 15. Sircar insisted that universities were only the first stage; they produced only students and not men of science vital to a mature nation:
38. ‘merely to learn parrot-like what other nations are teaching is to abdicate our position as an intellectual people, as a member of the republican of letters’. Annual Report of the IACS., p. 16.
39. IACS, Annual Report, 1901, p. 21.
40. IACS, Annual Report, 1893, p. 24.
41. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1900, p. 17, 17–18.
42. Rai Chunilal Bose Bahadur, ‘The science association and its founder’
43. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1918, pp. 37–38.
44. Kumar, Science and the Raj, pp. 199–200.
45. Palit, ‘Mahendralal Sircar, 1833–1904’, p. 157.
46. Kumar, Science and the Raj, p. 200.
47. IACS, A Century, p. 11.
48. Palit, ‘Mahendralal Sircar, 1833–1904’, pp. 157–58. In later years such a position was reiterated by Mahendra Lal Sircar's son and successor Amrita Lal Sircar. He took up the cause of fundamental science with greater zeal. Taking over the Association at the height of the Swadeshi movement in 1904/5 he criticized those whose ‘cry is for industry’ stressing the fallacy of ‘applied research’. He epitomized the ethics of disinterested fundamental research
49. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1905, pp. 21–23.
50. IACS, A Century, p. 15, 16.
51. IACS, Annual Report, 1893, p. 18.
52. IACS, A Century, p. 8.
53. Mahendra Lal Sircar, ‘A Sketch of the scheme of the science association’, in idem, Indian Association, p. 71.
54. Hindu Patriot, 1 June 1891, p. XXXV.
55. Sircar, ‘On the desirability’, p. 6, 8.
56. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, pp. 25–26.
57. Sircar, ‘A sketch’, p. 71, 77.
58. Hindu Patriot, 1 June 1891, p. XXXV.
59. IACS, Annual Report, 1898, p. 25.
60. Hindu Patriot, 1 June 1891, p. XXXV.
61. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, p. 17.
62. IACS, Annual Report, 1898, p. 21.
63. Sircar, ‘On the desirability’, pp. 8–9.
64. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1915, p. 26.
65. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, p. 20.
66. IACS, A Century, p. 9.
67. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1887, p. 15.
68. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1891, pp. 26–27.
69. IACS, Annual Report, 1901, p. 31.
70. IACS, Annual Report, 1902, p. 27, 28. Such appeals based themselves on the ‘moral and intellectual’ aspect of ‘nation-building’. However, Sircar also had an innate belief in the socialist distribution of ‘hoarded wealth’: ‘…. The money ought, in my humble opinion, to come from the rich whose wealth is ultimately traceable to the sweat of the brow of the poor. In contributing towards the advancement of science the discoveries of which tend more for their benefit than the benefit of the poor, the rich only repay a double debt which they are bound in all fairness to pay.’
71. IACS, Annual Report, 1898, p. 25, 23.
72. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1900, p. 19.
73. IACS, Annual Report, 1898, pp. 23–24.
74. IACS, Annual Report, 1901, pp. 25, 30;
75. also see IACS, Annual Report, 1902, p. 18.
76. IACS, Annual Report, 1902, p. 18.
77. IACS, Annual Report, 1901, p. 33, 32.
78. IACS, Annual Report, 1902, p. 19. At times Sircar felt the project had not even taken off. He found the task too imposing if not impossible: …But unless this be the faith of all my countrymen, or at least of our leaders, no amount of faith of a single individual will avail. Strangely enough, the experience of a whole life compels me to say that faith in the elevating and regenerating influence of science, if it does exist in the mind of our community, has not grown yet to bear fruit. Oye! Gentlemen, pardon me, if I question if it is a living faith at all.
79. IACS, Annual Report, 1899, p. 15, 16.
80. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1896, p. 20.
81. IACS, Annual Report, 1902, pp. 20–21.
82. Said, Orientalism, p. 150.
83. IACS, Annual Report, 1902, p. 22.
84. IACS, Annual Report, 1900, p. 25.
85. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse? Delhi, 1986, p. 67. However, in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay's case, the reconstruction of the perfect man was perhaps not as straightforward as suggested by Chatterjee. Sudipto Kaviraj argues that Chatterjee exaggerates the Victorian elements in Bankim's Krsna—the perfect man. According to Kaviraj, Bankim reconstructed Krsna within a traditional framework of re-definition. In the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, Krsna was transformed from a warrior-rationalist figure to a man of action and serious philosopher of praxis. Bankim reconstructed Krsna from within that tradition to provide a rational (as different from ‘rationalist’) solution to the crisis of the colonial situation. Krsna, through this ‘rational’ reconstruction, was transformed into the God of a dependent nation and had to help the nation to cross, nullify, reject, and transcend (in practice) the historic indignity, subjugation. This is part of Kaviraj's larger contention that Bankim was a man of both the traditional and the modern worlds. Bankim's aesthetic can be set against that of classical Sanskrit literature, and at the same time, that of the modern.
86. See Sudipto Kaviraj, The Unhappy Consciousness: Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay and the Formation of Nationalist Discourse in India, Delhi, 1995, particularly, pp. 74–106.
87. IACS, Annual Report, 1900, p. 26.
88. Ghosh, Life of Dr. Mahendralal Sircar, p. 317.
89. Said, Orientalism, p. 115.
90. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, pp. 56–57. 67.
91. Bose, Chunilal, ‘The science association and its founder’, pp. 45–46, 46.
92. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1907, p. 45, 80–84.
93. Steven J. Harris, ‘Transporting the Merton thesis: Apostolic spirituality and the establishment of the Jesuit scientific tradition’. Science in Context, Vol. 3: 1, pp. 29–65.
94. Udayan Namboodry, St. Xavier's: The Making of a Calcutta Institution, Delhi, 1995, p. 69.
95. IACS, Annual Report, 1900, p. 22, 22–23.
96. Biswas, ‘Revered Father Eugene Lafont’, p. 86, 84.
97. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1904, p. 29.
98. Namboodry, St. Xavier's, p. 77.
99. Biswas, ‘Revered Father Eugene Lafont’, p. 87.
100. IACS, Annual Report, 1902, p. 32.
101. See Andrew Cunningham, ‘How the Principia got its name: Or, taking natural philosophy seriously’, History of Science, Vol. xxix: 83 (part 4), 1991, pp. 377–92;
102. Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century, Princeton, 1986.
103. Cunningham, ‘How the Principa got its name’, p. 381.
104. IACS, Annual Report, 1904, p. 29.
105. Sircar, Moral Influence, p. 30.
106. ‘Dr. Sircar on Scientific Education’, The Bengalee, 15 January 1870, pp. 20–22.
107. Sircar, Moral Influence, p. 30, 22, 23. 23–30.
108. Ghosh, Life of Dr. Mahendralal Sircar, p. 317.
109. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, Chicago, (1962) 1970, pp. 140–41;
110. James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to come to terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870–1900, Cambridge, 1979.
111. Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought, p. 67.
112. Kumar, Science and the Raj, p. 195.
113. IACS, Annual Report of the IACS, Calcutta, 1903, p. 2.
114. Partha Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Post-Colonial Histories, Delhi, 1994, p. 6.
115. Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali's Child; The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramkrishna, Chicago, 1995, pp. 253–55, 256.
116. See Ashis Nandy, ‘An anti-secularist manifesto’, Seminar, October 1985, p. 15;
117. and his ‘The politics of secularism and the recovery of religious tolerance’, Alternatives, Vol. XII, 1980, pp. 177–94.